The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

Ray Kurzweil, the bold futurist and author of the New York Times best seller The Singularity Is Near, is arguably today’s most influential technological visionary. A pioneering inventor and theorist, he has explored for decades how artificial intelligence can enrich and expand human capabilities. Now, in his much-anticipated How to Create a Mind, he takes this exploration to the next step: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, then applying that knowledge to create vastly intelligent machines.

Machine Learning: The New AI: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

In this audiobook, machine learning expert Ethem Alpaydin offers a concise overview of the subject for the general listener, describing its evolution, explaining important learning algorithms, and presenting example applications. Alpaydin offers an account of how digital technology advanced from number-crunching mainframes to mobile devices, putting today's machine learning boom in context.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

Surviving AI is a concise, easy guide to what's coming, taking you through technological unemployment (the economic singularity) and the possible creation of a superintelligence (the technological singularity).

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail - human-level intelligence.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

After billions of dollars and 50 years of effort, researchers are finally cracking the code on artificial intelligence. As society stands on the cusp of unprecedented change, Jerry Kaplan unpacks the latest advances in robotics, machine learning, and perception powering systems that rival or exceed human capabilities. Driverless cars, robotic helpers, and intelligent agents that promote our interests have the potential to usher in a new age of affluence and leisure.

Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts

How does the brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state.

The Intelligent Web: Search, Smart Algorithms, and Big Data

As we use the Web for social networking, shopping, and news, we leave a personal trail. These days, linger over a Web page selling lamps, and they will turn up at the advertising margins as you move around the Internet, reminding you, tempting you to make that purchase. Search engines such as Google can now look deep into the data on the Web to pull out instances of the words you are looking for. And there are pages that collect and assess information to give you a snapshot of changing political opinion.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term accelerating forces.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

For over three decades, the great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence

A timely and important book that explores the societal and ethical implications of artificial intelligence as we approach the cusp of a fourth industrial revolution. George Zarkadakis explores one of humankind's oldest love-hate relationships: our ties with artificial intelligence, or AI. He traces AI's origins in ancient myth, through literary classics like Frankenstein to today's science fiction blockbusters, arguing that a fascination with AI is hardwired into the human psyche.

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on the Higgs boson and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void?

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: 25th Anniversary Edition

Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers - those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century

Digital technology is transforming every corner of the economy, fundamentally altering the way things are done, who does them, and what they earn for their efforts. In The Wealth of Humans, Economist editor Ryan Avent brings up-to-the-minute research and reporting to bear on the major economic question of our time: can the modern world manage technological changes every bit as disruptive as those that shook the socioeconomic landscape of the 19th century? Find out.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

The Industries of the Future

Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next 10 years - for businesses, governments, and the global community - and how we can navigate them.

The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations, or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times; an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the Earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism?

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle to explain the unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping lanes, and Internet cables. The new arms race is to connect to the most markets.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Ge­nius, brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

Audible Editor Reviews

The same man who created the Palm Pilot and other handheld devices criticizes contemporary technology for not learning more lessons from the greatest computer of all -- the human brain. Not stopping there, Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee go on to tackle the head-scratching subject of how our brains really work, and if artificial intelligence can ever truly catch up. But what really sets this listen apart is the passion with which the authors address the big questions about our brains.

After a solid intro from Hawkins, Stefan Rudnicki takes over the narrating reins. The effect is an audio program with a compelling ability to anticipate the question taking form in your own brain as you listen, then answer it with clarity and sincerity. That's a feat worthy of admiration.

Publisher's Summary

Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, Treo smart phone, and other handheld devices, has reshaped our relationship to computers. Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself.

Hawkins develops a powerful theory of how the human brain works, explaining why computers are not intelligent and how, based on this new theory, we can finally build intelligent machines.

The brain is not a computer, but a memory system that stores experiences in a way that reflects the true structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and their nested relationships and making predictions based on those memories. It is this memory-prediction system that forms the basis of intelligence, perception, creativity, and even consciousness.

In an engaging style that will captivate audiences from the merely curious to the professional scientist, Hawkins shows how a clear understanding of how the brain works will make it possible for us to build intelligent machines, in silicon, that will exceed our human ability in surprising ways.

Written with acclaimed science writer Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence promises to completely transfigure the possibilities of the technology age. It is a landmark book in its scope and clarity.

What the Critics Say

"[Hawkins's] argument is complex but comprehensible, and his curiosity will intrigue anyone interested in the lessons neurobiology may hold for AI." (Booklist) "[Hawkins] fully anticipates, even welcomes, the controversy he may provoke within the scientific community and admits that he might be wrong, even as he offers a checklist of potential discoveries that could prove him right. His engaging speculations are sure to win fans." (Publishers Weekly)

Epiphany:
1. A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something.
2. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization: ?I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would change the way I viewed myself? (Frank Maier).

Jeff Hawkins proposes a theory for how the mind works that rings true. I found this book to be a profound mind-expanding experience, allowing my mind to finally understand how my mind works. I am a 45-year old Software Engineer strongly tempted to take up Hawkin's call to young scientists to join the new revolution that will take place as we learn how to apply this model of mind to computers.

This book will probably be of most interest to people who are interested in both computers and psychology, but I think many people who are not interested in computers will still find this book fascinating. Anyone who is interested in the miracle of consciousness and sentience should read this book.

Another reviewer complained that the "ghost narrator" is a poor reader. This narrator is Stephan Rudnicki, a professional voice actor with a deep, resonant voice. He is one of the reader's on the Ender's Game series. There is something about his voice that is a bit unsettling, but I would never call it simpering. Overall, I think he was an excellent choice for narrator for this book.

Note: there are some figures/diagrams in the printed book that can be downloaded from audible.com. The link is on the main page for this book.

This is, all and all, a pretty solid book, particularly if you already have some interest in the field. It explains both current state of modern neuroscience as well as the author's theory of the basis for intelligence. If you are interested in this topic it's probably worth the download. You will have to put up with a few minor irritations, such as (1) the author's ego occasionally bleeds through with little snotty asides. He's fairly arrogant and quickly dismissive of alternative views, (2) his theory seems internally consistent but is ultimately a little reductionist. The brain almost certainly does work, at some level, just as he describes it. But when he pushes the model into describing the creative process, the basis of consciousness and some other areas, it feels a little thin. It's an engineer's view of the essence of these aspects of human behavior, overly wedded to a simplistic structure, ignoring nuances which are clearly important. (3) There is one chapter in the book which doesn't translate into a book tape very well, because it's fairly technical and relies on diagrams. But even if you don't entirely drink his Kool-Aid, this is still an interesting, thought-provoking way to spend a few hours.

An excellent book well worth the listen. Not very technical, and a lot is left out. The most frustrating is the almost total lack of discussion of feedback, neuron death, and connectivity changes. I never found this tedious, indeed I would love two more volumes. Even if the authors theories are utterly wrong, anyone interested in intelligence or AI would benefit from reading this book. The author is a bit of a salesperson, a bit conceited, but may very well be correct, and is, in any case, quite interesting.

I don't normally talk to friends about what I'm reading. But for the past two weeks I've been obsessively telling friends - even my 78-year-old mother - about this book. Maybe it's just me, but I find hearing On Intelligence has changed the way I think about computing and human intelligence. I suddenly feel I understand a range of phenomena which have intrigued or baffled me for years.

I can't do justice to Hawkins's thesis, but I'll take a stab. He claims to have figured out how the cortex - the part of the brain that was "new" to mammals, and whose size seems to be the greatest difference between humans and other primates - works. In other words, he asserts a general theory of what makes humans intelligent, and more generally, of what we're doing when we think.

Based on several lines of evidence, he rejects the idea that the cortex is primarily sifting through input data, looking for general patterns, with each stage summarizing and passing information up to more abstract levels. Instead, Hawkins asserts that the cortex is mainly MODELING the world we sense, and spends the great bulk of its effort actually passing predictive data DOWN to lower levels, including sensory areas.

These predictions are broken into an unbeliveably detailed representation of the world, modeling at the level of individual sensory neuron, what we will see, hear, touch, in the next second or two. Wherever this prediction is more-or-less right, it is treated as "confirmed" and the world we experience is mainly THAT PREDICTION, not a summation of this instant's actual nerve receptors' sensations. Where the prediction is NOT confirmed, an "exception" is generated, which either causes minor adjustments in the predicted scenario, or draws our conscious attention to the unexpected event.

If that doesn't make sense, listen to the book. There's a lot more to it.

This book has changed the way I see the world. I think it's a really big deal.

I'm not qualified to judge how well this book stands up to peer-review within the biological sciences. I'd guess that it not fully accepted by high-end biological researchers, but I'd also guess that this has more to do with the interdisciplinary nature of the work than with any fundamental disagreement about the big concepts. However, I am qualified to say that as a continuation of the cognitive science tradition within computer science this book is simply masterful.

The overall thesis of the book is that the human brain is architecturally not a computer, but rather a smart memory. Of course, this is an architectural distinction rather than a functional distinction. But the distinction yields important clues about how to build smart machines.

The book goes on to propose that memories are recalled using a mixture of forward error correction and search that is biased on invariants. The algorithmic details of this recall mechanism are not fully understood, but can be imitated, at least clumsily with various electronic circuits. The book further suggests that learning is the combination of laying down memories and finding useful patterns in these memories.

If, like me, you're a software developer with an interest in true artificial intelligence, this is a very stimulating book. Hawkins applies his own engineer's mind to an effort to discern and describe the human brain's underlying "cortical algorithm", the means by which intelligence "works". As Hawkins sees it, the neuroscience community has been too focused on the minutae of how neurons function, without giving adequate consideration to the brain's overall learning and decision-making architecture, while the computer science community has been too absorbed in traditional symbolic and procedural computation methods, ignoring insights that might be gleaned from studying the most powerful problem-solving system in nature. Of course, it's untrue that neuroscientists and comp-sci academics aren't interested in each other's disciplines, but the crossover is still a long way from mainstream. For coders working in industry (like me), Hawkin's thoughts may be revelatory.

The author focuses most of his attention on the cortex, the most recently evolved part of the human brain, and the one responsible for many functions of higher intelligence. His speculation is that this system uses the same generalized learning/prediction algorithm throughout, with little difference in how input from vision, hearing, touch, and other senses are processed. All this data is just sequences of patterns that the cortex filters through its multilayered hierarchy, each layer discerning trends in the input from lower layers, and forming models of the world.

This may sound like the traditional AI concept of "neural networks", but Hawkins breaks from that model with his view that the cortex uses massive amounts of feedback from higher, more time-invariant layers (which view the world more abstractly) to lower, more time-variant layers (which deal with more concrete experience), activating many context switches. He sees the cortex as a blank slate upon birth, which follows relatively simple programming to accumulate and categorizes knowledge. As our minds form, we find ourselves experiencing the world less through our sensory input, and more through our pre-formed models. Only when there is conflict between those models and our input sequences, is our conscious attention drawn to our senses.

In terms of biological neuroscience, this is all probably overly simplistic and not completely accurate (Hawkins doesn't give a lot of attention to the older, more instinctive parts of the brain), but if he's even partly right, his ideas have huge implications for artificial intelligence. If much our human intelligence really does boil down to a generalized memory-prediction algorithm -- one that may be complex, but not beyond our understanding -- the effects on the future will be astounding. Even if Hawkins wasn't able to prove his claims, they're fascinating to contemplate, and the next few decades will certainly shed a lot of light on their truth.

If this book speaks to you, consider also reading Marvin Minsky's A Society of Minds, which contains a lot of complementary ideas.

My husband and I have altered our language. "That didn't make it to the fourth level," we say to each other when there's an automatic reaction to an event. Or "Maybe you need to engage the sixth level..." when facing a problem. And: "Intelligence is the ability to predict..." when my husband's keys are still in his pocket as he approaches the door of the car...

This book was sometimes redundant-- but repetition leads to retention and I needed it sometimes.

I have a Ph.D. in applied behavior analysis because learning theory has always intrigued me. This was the closest I've ever come to feeling like someone has united the nature-nurture issue. I often think of the question he asks: What would a brain do with an eternity of learning?
What would happen if each generation did not have to re-learn the same things?

There were some areas I felt were incompletely developed. I want to know how emotions interact with the learning process. I want to know to enhance the generalizations which lead to creative thinking. How do we Brain Train in a general fashion?? And how do we untrain the brain?

A book that leaves me with the desire to know more is definitely a book I'd recommend to friends.

Having listened to many non-fiction Audible books, some good, some mediocre, this was my first listening experience that literally captured my imagination. As a result I found it rather difficult to stop listening and attend to my daily chores. I've struggled for many years to understand the mechanics of what brains do with very little success. As Jeff began to lay out his framework my own brain was firing patterns of YES, YES, YES! I began to experience the very rare and pleasant sensations that occur when getting a first glimpse of a puzzle solution. There's nothing like it in the world! This will be the first audible book that I feel compelled to purchase in hard copy. I'm glad I listened first; it's the perfect format for experiencing the marvelous fun in thinking about thinking and the profound joy in gaining understanding about understanding.

Of course, I can't guarantee that you'll experience anything similar to what I've described. I can guarantee that Jeff will provide you with a fascinating and powerful framework by which some surprising clarity can replace the murky waters of notions like "intelligence", "understanding", and "reality".

I greatly enjoyed On Intelligence. Not only is it well written and easy to get into (at least in most cases), but it introduces a new paradigm for neurological functioning that will probably replace the models most commonly used by engineers, doctors and academics. This new paradigm has the potential to lead to enormous breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and other areas that stand to greatly benefit mankind in general and individuals in particular. This is a truly multi-disciplineary book that I found both entertaining and fascinating.

The theories and data in the book are truly fascinating, but the author’s style and the narration detract from the content.

The main theme contrasts how our minds work with the way computers work. The writer's hypothesis is that no one will ever build an "intelligent" computer using the existing "computational" design structure of computers, even as technology progresses to produce increased computational speed and memory capacity (which, according to the author, have been the traditional, but incorrect, explanations for "artificial intelligence’s" failure to replicate the “true intelligence” of the human mind). The book contains many eye opening examples of things no computer has ever accomplished, but we accomplish easily and quickly with our minds – and others that human minds accomplish in a fraction of a second, but the biggest and fastest computers built to date take hours to "compute" – and it explains why.

But the author’s interesting message suffers from his lack of focus in choosing an audience and writing for that audience. Instead, the book oscillates (in an almost schizophrenic way) between excessive scientific minutia (which seems to have been directed at convincing the scientific community of his credentials, and the validity of his theories); and "talking down" to the average reader (so they'll "get it"). And unfortunately, the style problem is compounded by the narrator’s tone of voice, which makes the writer sound arrogant and condescending. Other authors have proven that scientific data can be presented in an interesting and intelligible way, even to lay audiences. (One obvious example is the light hearted and entertaining style of Bill Bryson in A Short History of Almost Everything.)

In short, while the content of the book is clearly fascinating, I think most readers would enjoy it more if they waited for an Audible abridged version, with (hopefully) a better narrator.